Hungry (for Knowledge)? Why Wait?

April 23, 2014, 9:55 am

I’m not usually a procrastinator. Yet, here it is at 8:42 a.m. on the day my blog post is due, and I’m just getting started. Sometimes procrastination just can’t be avoided. Things come up that take precedence over others. Life, work, family, and the unexpected all happen and some goals just need to get pushed aside. For me, making sure our spring break classes ran smoothly, staffing our summer classes, and getting our summer schedule to the printer were more of a priority than writing this blog last week. Missing a day of work for a funeral did not help either.

The non-procrastinator in me is kicking myself for not having written this blog when things were a bit slower the week before our spring break courses, but as the saying goes, “Woulda, shoulda, coulda.” There’s no point in me dwelling on what I could have done. I do need to learn from this under-the-gun writing experience and make sure I get a jump on writing these posts in the future.

The consequence for not doing my blog ahead of time is that I’m frantically typing. I’m poised to make my deadline so I’m not completely panicked. Some procrastinators are faced with some very serious consequences. Many of our students often wait until the semester before their certification deadline to take a class with us. What are the consequences of not meeting that deadline? In many cases it is losing his or her teaching license and job! That sounds like reason enough to kick that procrastination habit.

The great news for procrastinators and non-procrastinators alike is that the Office of Continuing Education has courses that (hopefully!) meet the needs of all our fellow teachers. It’s April 23, 2014 and we still have four sessions worth of 3-credit courses that will begin and end before June 30th, most teacher’s certification deadline. So, if you still need to take a course or four before June 30th, we’ve got you covered. (See Spring Sessions 7 and 8 and Summer Sessions 2 and 4) However, that’s not all that we have coming up. Besides those four sessions, we have five more that in person class sessions that will begin between June 21st and July 28th and finish by August 1st. We also have two online course sessions, in which students can enroll in a maximum of two courses at a time, that begin on June 2nd and July 28th. Essentially, between now and your new school year, you could take 13 courses! Okay. Thirty-nine credits is a little ambitious, but you get my point.

With all these options, why not take care of your 2015, 2016, 2017, or 2018 certification deadline in summer 2014? We never know what life, work, and family are going to throw at us over the next couple of summers. Don’t have the money to take a class right now? No problem. With the cost of our courses at $530 you could save $10 a week of your paycheck and will have enough money saved to take a course next summer.

I encourage you to stop procrastinating. Think ahead about your certification and think about what a class this summer could do for your classroom now. For example, if you are teaching Social Studies this fall, why not take Methods of Teaching Social Studies this summer? If you wait and take it in summer 2017 just because you have a deadline to meet, you would have been teaching Social Studies for 3 years without the wealth of teaching techniques and resources you’d gain from the course. Make your job easier; Get more tools in your tool belt and stop that certification deadline from looming over you! Take a Professional Development course this summer (or spring). And learn from my mistakes: Don’t procrastinate!

Contact the Office of Continuing Education by email at ContinuingEd@trinitydc.edu, or by phone at (202) 884-9300. Fax registration materials to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on our secure fax line: (202) 884-9084.